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This is the online presentation of a 125-day series of mini-profiles of famous and infamous Montanans. The series commemorates 125 years of publishing the Great Falls Tribune. The articles will appear on the Montana section front Mondays through Saturdays, and on the Sunday Life page on Sundays. Additions will appear here after appearing in the newspaper.

With his talent and dedication, publisher Mel Ruder of the Hungry Horse News in Columbia Falls turned Montana’s disastrous 1964 flood into the story of a lifetime, becoming the state’s first Pulitzer Prize winner.

Ruder worked around the clock during the early June catastrophe, employing his remarkable photographic talent to document the havoc wrought by the flood that claimed more than 30 lives on both sides of the Continental Divide.

He rented planes when he could and begged a seat when he couldn’t. He drove his car down the railroad tracks where the roads were washed out. He rode in boats in the floodwaters to take photos.

He fed information to the Associated Press and to state daily newspapers. In the earliest hours of the flood threat, he kept a nighttime Kalispell radio station apprised of the growing menace so listeners could take action.

Ruder put out three editions in one week — quite a feat for a weekly newspaper — and ordered higher press runs.

The circulation of the paper he started in 1946 normally was nearly twice the town’s population anyway, due in large part to his trademark coverage and photography of Glacier National Park a few miles distant.

Award-winning University of Montana author Dorothy Johnson nominated Ruder for the Pulitzer Prize, which he won in 1965.

Ruder continued running and writing for the Hungry Horse News until he sold it and retired in 1978.

In 1991, the Montana Newspaper Association gave the North Dakota native its Master Editor and Publisher Award. An elementary school in Columbia Falls is named in his honor. Ruder died on Nov. 19, 2000, in Columbia Falls.

Mel Ruder works on the paper known for its coverage of Glacier National Park. Tribune file photo by Ray Ozmon.

Mel Ruder, in his daughter's Kalispell, Mont., home Jan., 21, 1999, poses with the Speed Graphic camera he used when he started the Hungry Horse News in Columbia Falls in 1946. Behind him is a hand-tinted enlargement of a photo he took in Glacier National Park in the 1950s. Ruder won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965.

Sources: “Montana Almanac” by Andrea Merrill & Judy Jacobson; “A Century of Montana Journalism” edited by Warren Brier & Nathan Blumberg; “Montana: A History of Two Centuries” by Michael Malone and Richard Roeder; Tribune files, New York Times.